by Eric

Don’t hard reboot Ubuntu installed by Wubi

My ubuntu behaves abnormally after a hard reboot this morning, after searching for solution in ubuntu community, I’m redirected to the WubiGuide:

Corrupted NTFS filesystem

All reported cases of damaged filesystems so far were from people that hard rebooted (pulling the plug).

When you hard reboot, you can always damage your filesystem whether you use wubi or not. What happens is that new users sometimes get stacked with wubi/ubuntu and since they do not know what to do they tend to hard-reboot more often than necessary. Sometimes they get lucky, sometimes they do not. Since wubi sits on top of ntfs of course when they do not get lucky, ntfs gets corrupted. Sometimes people blame Wubi for that even though a quick googling will show you that there are tons of people experiencing ntfs corruption without having ever used wubi or ntfs-3g (and a full software industry lurking on that…), most of them after a hard reboot…

If ntfs filesystem gets corrupted you have to run chkdsk /r from the windows recovery console on the Windows CD (or other recovery CD available on the web) or in the msdos console (if you can boot into Windows). At the moment there is no fsck for ntfs on the Linux side, otherwise it would be possible to fix errors automatically within Linux itself, as it happens for other filesystems, without having to rely on Windows tools.

Best advise is to simply avoid hard rebooting. Whatever the OS.

So, if you still insist to hard reboot your ubuntu from time to time, try to install it yourself.

UPDATE: I got no lucky in doing chkdsk in windows, but finally got ubuntu back to work, still with problems, by remounting the filesystem with write and read mode: